I've been a gamer, of a sort, for most of my life. The funny thing is. I haven't owned a single console since the Playstation 2, a full 15 years or so ago.

To get around this limitation, I've relied on illegally downloading PC games, and going to my friends to play on his consoles through the PS3 and PS4 generations, including the Wii, WiiU and now Switch. That being said, I've played quite a lot of games over the years without spending a dime.

Things have changed.

After said friend got a PS4 +, he was kind enough to hand down the PS4 regular to me. The first thing I did was put Bloodborne on and buy Elder Scrolls Online (a game I can barely play thanks to Chinese Internet).

Bloodborne is something special, but I've known and played parts already in the past. But there's a new game I've known about since mid-2016 that I am super excited about, in a way that I haven't before: Death Stranding.

Why post about this?

The three trailers to this game have been eating away at me, and the level of speculation I've gone through is like never before. I think anybody, gamer or otherwise, will find these trailers utterly fascinating and eager to try and put the pieces together. They're also beautifully rendered. I'll put the trailers here in order of release and below I'll add my speculations as to just what the f**k is going on.

This is about 20 minutes of footage so sit back and enjoy.

Trailer 1

Trailer 2

Trailer 3

Awesome, right?

Now for this game I'm doing my best not to click on the theories and analysis videos, but it's obviously up to you what you check out and what comments you read.

One reason I'm so fascinated by this game is the subtle elements of sci-fi that seem to shroud the entire game. The manipulation on the laws of physics is something I love when done maturely, and this game seems to succeed in that more eloquently than, say, the movie Gravity or Interstellar, while still allowing an absurdly surreal experience. We'll get into the physics later.

The Baby

So the most striking thin... ok there are too many striking things, but one striking thing to me is of course the baby. At first I thought perhaps everybody was carrying one around to keep them alive or something but it becomes clear that it's all just one baby. In the second trailer, you can just see a little tendril grab onto the toy baby that gets dragged to the weirdly handsome alien/monster guy, which to me means the bad guy's are trying to get the baby and he was briefly tricked there.

So the baby appears to be the centre of the show, perhaps the humans need it to save the human race or something, but why are they plugging it into each other, and why are there no women? At first I thought, perhaps the alien/monsters took all females to harvest humans, but that makes me wonder why at least 3 characters have suits designed to plug this baby into a rather proper-looking baby container? Looks like it was a common thing at some point.

To get to the conclusion of this idea I need to point out something else:

The Water

You'll notice in the third trailer that the man stuck under the truck is a young man, until the man trying to help him moves out of the way and suddenly he starts aging incredibly fast, ending up an old man before he's covered again. At the very beginning of trailer 3, you see plants growing and then rapidly dying in the rain. On top of this, all the sea life in the first trailer are dead on the beach. The water appears to have some time-travel effect or something that is messing up the landscape. The plants imply that they are still able to grow, just in super-speed.

In the second trailer, the man carrying the baby looks down and sees the oily water at his feed, and responds by quickly plugging the baby into his suit or himself or whatever, possibly to keep his youth. Another, less solid piece of evidence for this comes in the first trailer where Sam wakes up at the beach and the baby is by his side. He gets up and he has a cross-section of scars across his abdomen, already healed. Yet the baby, which we see is inside him in the Third trailer, is right there on the beach, presumably only having left his body hours or minutes before. It may be the case that he used the seawater to quickly heal his wounds before passing out or something along those lines.

Given how the baby seems related to aging, and also vanishes here into black hand-prints, the baby seems to have some kind of control over both time and space. The look on the baby's face in a brief slow-mo scene in trailer 2 makes me think there's much more to this baby than meets the eye. But WHAT??

The Explosion

This is the bit that throws me. Trailer 3 starts with this dialogue about explosions such as the big bang, and ends with a huge meteorite crater being look upon by both the protagonist and 5 mysterious floating figures. In the scene where we're underwater going down to the bottom, we pass a ca door with a picture of the US map on it - only the kind of New York/Washington area has been totally wiped out with a massive hole there.

This to me brings the idea of aliens coming to earth via an asteroid or comet and then messing everything up accordingly, but this doesn't explain even remotely what a baby or the manipulation of physics has to do with anything at all. It also doesn't explain why there are skeleton soldiers and handsome alien soldiers that clearly take a human form.

The Physics

One thing I noticed was the game developers' attempts to use physics properly. In a HD rendering of Sam the protagonist, his necklace shows physics equations written on it, crossing 7 dog tag-type things. In the image, you can see two of these equations.

The First is the Schwarzschild radius which demonstrates the point at which enough density or size will turn mass into a black hole,

The second is the Dirac equation, which is an equation that successfully bridges between Quantum mechanics and Special relativity, and predicted the existence of anti-matter, the opposite particles of all matter we know and observe in the Universe. Perhaps these equations are related.

A 200lb human body has a potential energy, atom for atom of about 8.1x10¹⁸J, but obviously we can't just go splitting these atoms and making us explosive or ISIS would have done it by now. I wonder if the giant whose head closes on the human trying to stab himself before he gets taken, and then explodes is somehow harnessing that potential energy in a human to use for itself.

It would explain the explosion - a nuclear release of energy - but that's about the best I can do. Perhaps the aliens need a steady supply and thus took all the females away to be harvested, hence why there are only men looking after this baby (and perhaps others). This is a real weak idea but it's the best I can do. I mean, I'd expect half the continent to go missing if this were really the case.

To make matters more confusing, when Sam vomits out black beetles for reasons I'm not even going to try and unravel, they bizarrely walk upwards through mid-air, but in a way that seems like they're walking on a surface. A whale is seen swimming upside down in the third trailer, and the rocks and carcasses are shown lifting up into the air when the big giant guy does his thing.

These aren't arbitrary choices by the developers, but I can't decide how these physical manipulations connect. One idea my friend read was that humans created a new big bang and thus an alternate universe that seems to be intertwined with our own reality, hence why physics is being messed up, but it doesn't explain the huge asteroid nor the baby or pretty much anything else.

The Characters

Even less can be said about the characters seen in the trailer. The mystical man on top of the truck before everything turns to liquid seems to know the good guys but is not necessarily one of them. The huge tall shadows in the distance look too big to be the 5 floating characters we see twice, once in trailer 1 and again in trailer 3. The man in the sewer is even more bizarre, as are the military that ooze black goo behind a tank that has giant chunk of intestines loosely wrapped around it.

All I can really say is that Sam perhaps at one point deliberately hid the baby inside his own body in an attempt to kidnap it or hide it from the bad guys in an attempt to save the human race. When he wakes up, the relief on his face is understandable, only to find it disappears, and he looks up to see the five godly figures. The chubby man also made attempts to keep the baby safe and hidden, and the man who stabbed himself sacrificed himself yet made sure the baby was safe too.

Conclusion

There's a whole lot more I had thought about, like why there are hand-prints all over Sam's body in Trailer 1... or why there are hand-prints instead of footprints altogether, what those weird flashy light things are, what's going on with the golden skull corpse sinking into the ground, why the toy baby was glowing red and so on... But the imagination and creativity in this game seems unfathomable to me I just revel in thinking about it. Hideo Kojima has a very good track record so I have every ounce of trust that he isn't going to screw this up, and it will be the first full-price game I'm actually going to fully invest in. I'm super excited, couldn't you tell?

If anybody else has any ideas they wanna discuss I'd love to hear them in the comments!